After 11 years at Facebook/Meta, Jason Rubin is leaving his role as vice president of metaverse creative.
Rubin had an incredible amount of cred as a gaming leader, as he joined Meta through the Oculus VR acquisition and was a cofounder of Naughty Dog, the creator of franchises like Jak & Daxter and Crash Bandicoot.
He will be leaving the Meta role in March, Rubin said on his LinkedIn page.
“This was a difficult decision and I have nothing but deep appreciation for Mark and Andrew Bosworth’s leadership, gratitude to the company, love for my coworkers, and excitement for our Horizon and VR roadmap,” he wrote.
He added, “I’m incredibly proud of multiple eras of my work at Meta. I helped to build the Oculus Content team, Meta’s first content production and dev rel organization, and producing a lot of highly reviewed and industry applauded titles. I’m also proud of building the Metaverse Creative Team, empowering Design and Art, and raising our quality bar.”
And he said, “Why now? And the answer is relatively boring: This seems like a good time. I am going to chase animals with a camera. You can follow the results on my Instagram @jrubin.”
He joined Facebook in 2014 as director of Worldwide Studios at Oculus and held that role for a couple of years. He went on to other roles at Facebook and headed both VR/AR partnerships and content as well as special gaming initiatives at Facebook. He also held roles as VP of Play at Meta, VP of Metaverse Content, VP of Metaverse Experience and finally VP of Metaverse Creative.
Before joining Meta, Rubin was president of THQ, founder of mobile game maker Monkey Gods, CEO of Flektor at Fox Interactive, and cofounder of Naughty Dog. The latter firm started in 1984.
At Naughty Dog, he was best known for making memorable game franchises like Jak and Daxter and Crash Bandicoot on the PlayStation. He sold the company to Sony in 2001 and left Naughty Dog in 2004.
Meta still has gaming cred in the form of Samanthan Ryan, vice president of content. She joined a couple of years ago after a long stint at Electronic Arts. And Rubin is the second major gaming exec to leave a company this week. Christoph Hartmann, head of Amazon Game Studios, also announced he was resigning his role.
Rubin’s resignation came after an estimated 1,000 people were laid off at Meta’s Reality Labs division, which is reportedly taking a hit a Meta is putting more emphasis on its AI glasses Meta Ray-Ban products which are selling by the millions.